Caught by the Sea Read online

  But as he spun tales of the South Pacific, I saw dusky dancing maidens and balmy nights, sliding along with the trade winds caressing our naked bodies while we replaced planks with available wood and let the magic of the tropics take our cares away. . . .

  Only a bit of serendipity kept me from buying the boat and sailing off to my doom. We were down inside the boat, which looked nicely nautical with varnished wood and white paint, and I was ready to sign the deal when I noticed a floor panel that seemed to be slightly open. I am ashamed to admit that I had not looked beneath the panels or inside the cupboards, and I leaned forward and pulled the panel up, my head still full of dreams of tropical nights. I was surprised to see water there, welling up. Not just standing in the bilge but growing while I watched, and then an electric pump kicked in and the water level went back down until the pump stopped, when it immediately rose again, pushing at the floor panels, and the pump started again. . . .

  The boat would sink in a couple of hours if the automatic bilge pump weren’t working. Finally my brain woke up. I decided to look in the bilge and found that the frames holding the planking were so rotten the wood came away in my hand.

  “It needs a lick of paint here and there,” the broker said. “And maybe tighten a few screws . . .”

  I left him there and went to the next brokerage, and the next, finding boats either falling apart or way too expensive for my pocketbook, and quite often both.

  I don’t know how long this might have gone on. I was there several days, sleeping in my car. I looked at scores of boats and couldn’t find anything that would work until I was in the Ventura harbor walking down the docks just looking at boats in general when I came upon a little twenty-two-footer with a tiny wooden bowsprit and a small cabin that had a faded sign hanging on the bow pulpit: For Sale by Owner.

  It was a Schock 22, three years old. It was sloop rigged with a keel/centerboard that could be dropped when fighting against the wind, what’s called beating to windward.

  She had a tiny cabin less than five feet high, a small wooden table and two bunks, a little alcohol stove, a head (toilet) up in the middle of the fore-peak; and (best of all) she was made of fiberglass. This was before soft cores and more flexible hulls, and she was handcrafted of fiberglass nearly an inch thick. In most respects she was nearly bullet-proof. Later, through ineptness, I ran her into a dock at four knots while trying to sail into the slip and all she did was dent the wood of the dock and bounce off.

  I called the owner and he agreed to let me pay her off over time. I moved on board and slept in the boat that first night and dreamed of the South Pacific and the trade winds, and I awakened the next morning and made coffee and sat there in the cockpit thinking that all I had to do now was learn to sail and I was ready to go.

  Just that, learn to sail.

  No problem.

  People did it all the time. How hard could it be?

  Of course, there are many degrees of sailing ability. It is an art, most assuredly, and it is an art that you can develop for the rest of your life; you will never learn it all because wind and sails and water are different at all times.

  Still, everybody must start somewhere. Had I known how truly ignorant I was, I think I would have given it all up as a bad job.

  I had never sailed on the ocean.

  I did not know anything about boats.

  I did not know anything about the sea.

  I did not know any of the terminology and couldn’t tell a block from a pintle. The first time somebody said something about the sheets, I thought they were talking about the sails.

  But I had a boat, and thanks to pure luck and the honesty of the man who sold her to me, she was a very good boat, with seven different sails and a solid anchoring system, and all in all was in very fine shape, maintenance up to date, everything stowed clean.

  So I sat on her that sunny morning in Ventura, California, and I felt a soft breeze on my cheek while I sipped coffee and I thought, I have to take her out sailing. Or, to be more accurate, I thought, I have to take it out sailing, because I had not yet come to understand how boats are alive and are always “she.”

  I looked up at the mast. It was wooden and seemed exceptionally tall. (It turned out that she was slightly overpowered, which was very nice in light airs because she got a lot of power out of very little wind. But it was bad in heavy winds because she was so tender, that is, so sensitive to the wind.) There were lines and ropes and cables going all over the place: some kind of rope going up the mast and down to the front sail and then another kind of rope going up the mast and down to the mainsail and then two ropes coming from the front sail bag back to little round winch things in the cockpit and then a whole cluster of ropes and pulleys that seemed to control the back of the boom thing.

  All right, I remember thinking, let’s start with what I know.

  I knew the boom thing held the bottom of the big sail. Then I understood that the pulleys at the back of the boom controlled where it would go. Then I followed the rope that pulled the mainsail up and found where it would tie off on the mast. Okay, I could pull up the main.

  I threw back the rest of my coffee, put the cup on the table down inside the boat next to my typewriter and started the proceedings that would lead to what I later termed the First Disaster.

  The boat had a small outboard on the back, or stern, and I checked the fuel, found it full, gave the cord a yank. It fired straight off.

  A good start.

  Then I threw off the dock lines and pushed the boat back into the space between the two rows of docks and clambered back into the cockpit. I increased the throttle and she started to move forward. She had a tiller as opposed to a wheel, and I slapped the handle over and brought her nose out into the opening of the fairway that led to the breakwaters at the harbor mouth. I had little sense but enough to know not to put the sails up in the dock, and when we were in the open I stopped the motor, went to the rope, or halyard, that pulled up the main and yanked it up with all my strength.

  How I got this far without a real problem is hard to understand, but it was about here that my ignorance really kicked in.

  The main was much larger than the sail I had seen at Lake Arrowhead, and as soon as it was up it filled with the morning breeze and slammed over to the side. I had not loosened the sheet, and so the boat, light and quick, took off immediately, playing off to the left as the tiller swung over. I was working up at the right side of the mast and was dumped cleanly off the boat, falling through the two little lifelines into the muck of the harbor, where I treaded water and watched my new sailboat go off without me.

  After sailing thirty or forty yards she plowed into the rocks of the shoreline, narrowly missing the right hull of a trimaran that was tied to the end of a dock just adjacent to the opening. I swam to my boat and climbed in and got her moving again, until I hit the trimaran—the Second Disaster. That was just three hours before I hit the million-dollar yacht—the Third Disaster—and was chewed out by a woman who had a martini in one hand and a cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth around which flowed a stream of obscenities I had not heard since my military days. Sometime later I barely caught the edge of a Coast Guard cutter, whose skipper was quite nice and only gave me a courtesy ticket for not having a bell on my boat, although I’m not sure that at this stage of my sailing development a bell would have done me a great deal of good. Not nearly as much good as a few dozen rubber bumpers to hang around the boat.

  On the negative side, by the end of the first day I had still not left the harbor and was tied up to the courtesy dock because the motor would not start, and I did not have a clue as to how I could sail the boat back against the wind and into my slip at the dock. On the positive side, I had learned to put the mainsail up and get it down in a hurry—a big hurry. I had met lots of people, some of whom wanted to kill me and several of whom tried to help me, and I had learned to sail the boat in something approximating a straight line and to make it turn—come about—without we
tting myself or screaming, although none of this happened with any apparent plan or thought or regularity. Indeed, the boat seemed to have a mind of its own, and several times I found myself wrapped up and entangled in ropes in a helpless mess and looked up to see us (I already thought of the boat and me as something of a team, albeit a poorly trained one) heading into a dock full of boats and screaming people.

  I had still not brought up the second sail, the jib, and the thought of doing it froze me cold. I would have terrified half the harbor if they’d known I was going to try it.

  It was coming on to late evening, and I suddenly remembered the prime beauty of living on a boat—that I had everything with me necessary to life and didn’t have to go back to my dock. I decided to call it a day and spend the night at the courtesy dock.

  When it became evident that I was going to stop for the day, the harbor settled down—people had stationed themselves at the ends of docks and slips with boat hooks to fend me off—and as they went back to their normal lives I found myself caught up in the mystical qualities of living on a boat on the sea.

  I had made a trip on a boat and was spending the night at a different place.

  True, the trip had been a series of calamities punctuated by terror, and I had only come a total of about three hundred yards from my home dock.

  But still, I had traveled, and I was in a different place and had gotten there by sailing, and I was closer to the harbor mouth, to the sea, the reason for it all. I could see the jetties and the open sea from the courtesy dock, just a hundred and fifty yards away, and as I went below and crouched and crawled around, heating a can of beans on the alcohol stove, I felt the return of the excitement that had come over me as a child on the troopship, the excitement that has never really left me.

  The sea was right there, right there; I could see it out the small porthole over the stove, and as I crawled into my sleeping bag on the side bunk I thought that tomorrow was another day and I would go out there tomorrow, out of the harbor in the morning, and renew my old acquaintance.

  As it happened it came sooner.

  3

  The Open Sea

  I never sleep so soundly as I do on a boat after a hard day of work. The motion of the boat is like a cradle, and as the bunk rocks gently, the brain shuts down.

  This was how my first true night on the boat began, but sometime later, when the tide changed and began to flood, I was awakened. The motion had changed as the current started into the harbor, and the boat took a slight roll with the surge that came in. I pulled myself out of the bunk and stuck my head up out of the companionway.

  “Oh . . .” The sound escaped me, almost a sigh. The sky was clear and the moon—how had I not seen it earlier?—had come out full and bright. It was so beautiful it didn’t seem real, almost contrived in some fashion, as if nature were showing off by making the perfect sea-night. There were stars splattered all over the sky, dim near the moon, sparkling brightly away from the splash of white light, and across the sea and through the jetties and straight into the boat slashed a silver bar of reflected light from the moon.

  I had to be out there.

  I could not let that beauty simply go to waste. I pulled on my clothes, and a jacket since it was fairly cool. For the first time in my life I truly paid attention to the wind.

  There was a slight offshore breeze of four, five knots, no more, blowing out from the dock to the harbor mouth. Perfect.

  Earlier in the day the motor had quit on me. Before going to bed I’d discovered that a small rubber fuel line had vibrated loose, and I’d repaired it. I pulled the starter rope three times before it started, then untied the dock lines and idled away from the dock toward the harbor mouth, moving straight up the bar of moonlight.

  We were moving with the wind, about the same speed as the wind, so there would be no force on the sail. I tied a line around the tiller handle to hold it in position and pulled the mainsail up and cleated the halyard off and was even more amazed by the beauty of the moonlight as it reflected off the white sail.

  I could have read in this light. I was almost dazzled by it, and by the sea. I leaned back on the tiller to take it all in when a gentle swell worked through the harbor mouth.

  It was as if the boat took its first breath with the swell. The nose moved up, slid gently down, and she came to life.

  Horatio Nelson, the famous English naval hero, once was supposed to have said: “Men and ships rot in port.”

  Of course, he may have meant it literally, ports being what they are and men and old wooden ships being what they are, but I suspect he meant much more by it. Except for some rare bad designs, boats are not meant to live their lives tied to a dock in still water. It is a sad fact that most of them seem to spend their lives in just that way. On the California coast alone there are tens of thousands of sailboats and yet it is common to be out on a very nice weekend, sailing along fifty or sixty miles of coastline, and see only half a dozen boats outside the harbor.

  Boats are designed to sail in open water and they do not come alive until then. I had never known this until that first night as I slid past the jetties in the moonlight and felt her take the sea.

  It is an astonishing feeling, one that quickens me, makes my breath come softly.

  The motor suddenly became an intrusion, an ugly sound, and as soon as I was past the jetties and was in open ocean I killed it. For a few seconds, half a minute, we moved on in silence by inertia, coasting from the energy the motor had given us, and then it died and I felt the breeze again on my face as I looked to the rear. It was pushing at the back edge of the sail and I pulled the tiller over to steer off the wind a bit and felt the sail fill. The boat moved differently now, started the dance with the wind and water and moonlight as she heeled slightly and took on life, personality. We glided along in near silence, the only sound the soft gurgle of water along the hull.

  I did not dare to walk forward in the dark and put up the jib, having never done it before, but she sailed pretty well on the mainsail alone and we kept our course, moving at three or four knots by the speedometer in the cockpit, until daylight some four hours away, when the wind stopped, entirely, and left the dawning ocean as still as a pond and me marooned some twelve miles offshore.

  I didn’t care. I was completely enraptured by what had happened to me. I lowered the mainsail and sat peacefully drifting around in circles, feeling at home, truly at home.

  For the entire morning there was no wind, and while I might have had enough gas to motor partway back to the harbor, there was something wrong about using it on such a beautiful morning. I made a small pot of oatmeal on the little stove and some instant coffee and ate breakfast in the cockpit, letting the morning sun warm me; then I pulled my sleeping bag out of the cabin and laid it in the cockpit and took a small sleep while the boat rocked gently on the swells.

  A sound awakened me an hour or so later and I looked over the side to see the boat surrounded by swarms of small fish, maybe anchovies or herring. No sooner did I spot them than pelicans came in and began crash-diving around the boat and then other seabirds arrived, and within minutes a huge pod of dolphins, hundreds of them, showed up. The dolphins began working the school of bait fish, sweeping back and forth like happy wolves, thrashing the water with their tails, perhaps to stun the fish. Then they ate them by the thousands.

  While I lay in the calm, all around the boat the sea seethed with life. After the dolphins came some sharks, three or four on call to clean up the debris from the slaughter. In half an hour they were gone, moving off, following the schools of small fish and dolphins and flocks of seabirds.

  “Amazing,” I said aloud. It was amazing that I would be greeted on the sea with such enthusiasm, amazing that on one of the most populated coasts in the world, near a metropolis that stretched nearly two hundred miles from San Diego to Santa Barbara, where nearly eighteen million people jammed the freeways and sidewalks, I would be completely alone with the sea and my boat; amazing that the planet st
ill held such a place.

  4

  Learning to Sail

  It was a strange way to start sailing. I had flailed and collided my way around the harbor, finally got the boat to move after a fashion, then sailed into the open sea in the dark. And now there was no wind.

  All day.

  But there were things happening, and if I’d had any knowledge of the sea, they would have meant something to me. The ocean had started almost unbelievably flat, no waves, almost no swell. After dozing for a time and awakening and making more coffee, I noticed the boat starting to rock more than it had during the night and early morning.

  This meant nothing to me. It should have meant the world for it could be a matter of life and death. But at the time I thought, A little more swell out of the west, so what? There was no wind, no waves. I had the seabirds for company. . . .

  Except that I didn’t. The seabirds were gone now and had I been noticing I would have seen that they had all flown inland, flocks of them flying into sheltered waters, settling on protected back-waters and in harbors.

  Had I been more aware I would have known that on this coast at this time of the year—early fall—the prevailing wind was out of the northwest but that now and then there was a very strong offshore wind, called Santa Ana, and that it was sometimes followed by strong clearing westerlies. The offshore winds could easily hit fifty to seventy knots, and the clearing westerlies could veer, with a strong northerly component, and could run forty to fifty knots when they came up.

  The coast here ran almost straight east and west and I was twelve miles offshore, near the south end of a small island named Anacapa, where there was no good anchorage, though it wouldn’t have mattered since I’d never anchored and hadn’t any idea if the boat even had an anchor. (It did, a good Danforth with two hundred feet of new nylon line and thirty feet of chain.) I was about to get hit by a full gale.